Merritt Emily, Swain Shelley N, Vinci-Booher Sophia, James Karin H
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, United States.
Front Psychol. 2020 Mar 20;11:500. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00500. eCollection 2020.
In the age of technology, writing by hand has become less common than texting and keyboarding. Learning letters by hand, however, has been shown to have profound developmental importance. One aspect of writing by hand that has been understudied is the effect of learning symbols stroke-by-stroke, a dynamic action that does not occur with keyboarding. We trained children to draw novel symbols in either an instructed stroke order or in a self-directed stroke order and tested: (1) whether learning novel symbols in a self-directed stroke order benefits subsequent recognition more than learning in a specified stroke order, (2) whether seeing novel symbols unfold in the stroke order that was taught would aid in recognition, and (3) whether any effects are age-dependent. Our results demonstrate that producing a symbol with a self-directed stroke order provides more benefit to symbol recognition than instructed stroke orders in 4.0-4.5-year-old children but not in 4.5-5.0-year-old children. We found, further, that the observed recognition benefits were not affected by seeing the symbol unfold in the same stroke order it was learned during testing, suggesting that the learning was not reliant upon the exact stroke order experienced during learning. These results stress the importance of allowing children to produce symbols in a self-directed manner and, by extension, that constraining how a child learns to write can adversely affect subsequent recognition.
在科技时代，手写已不如短信和键盘输入常见。然而，通过手写学习字母已被证明具有深远的发展重要性。手写的一个未被充分研究的方面是逐笔学习符号的效果，这是一种在键盘输入中不会出现的动态行为。我们训练儿童以规定的笔画顺序或自主的笔画顺序绘制新符号，并测试：（1）以自主笔画顺序学习新符号是否比以规定笔画顺序学习更有利于后续识别；（2）按所学笔画顺序观看新符号展开是否有助于识别；（3）是否有任何效果与年龄有关。我们的结果表明，在4.0 - 4.5岁的儿童中，以自主笔画顺序绘制符号比规定笔画顺序对符号识别更有益，但在4.5 - 5.0岁的儿童中并非如此。我们进一步发现，观察到的识别优势不受测试期间按所学笔画顺序观看符号展开的影响，这表明学习并不依赖于学习期间经历的精确笔画顺序。这些结果强调了让儿童以自主方式绘制符号的重要性，进而表明限制儿童学习书写的方式可能会对后续识别产生不利影响。
